BRISBANE - Forget dieting ... it will only make you fat in the long run.
Long-term weight loss is more about lifestyle changes, a conference on the Sunshine Coast will be told this weekend.
Keynote speakers at The Clinicians' Challenge in Treating Obesity will be husband and wifeprofessors Peter Herman and Janet Polivy.
They are psychologists at the University of Toronto and world authorities in restraint theory, which holds that if you deny yourself food, you ultimately overeat.
Professor Polivy said most people trying to lose weight had unrealistic expectations and self-defeating behaviour from the start of the diet. When it failed, they were likely to gain weight before the next attempt, and so the cycle continued.
"I'll be talking about how restraint eating leads to the false-hope syndrome and how this results in failed attempts at dieting but renewed attempts that are no more likely to succeed," Professor Polivy said.
"Losing weight involves changing permanently how people live their lives."
About 50 clinicians from throughout Australia are meeting in the inaugural symposium of the newly formed Obesity Prevention and Treatment Society (Opats).
Its spokesman, Brisbane psychiatrist George Blair-West, said that people knew what to eat, but the question remained why didn't they do what they should do.
"We are better at treating most cancers than we are at treating obesity," Dr Blair-West said.
"Our five-year success rate in treating obesity is less than 20 per cent, and that's why we have this thing spiralling out of control."
Research also showed that after people lost weight, they usually regained all they lost plus 15 per cent, he said.
One topic for discussion would be whether obesity was an addiction or a willpower deficiency.
Unlike the campaign to make smoking unpopular to cut the addiction rate, food could not be made unpopular, Dr Blair-West said.
"That's why, with this conference, we want to focus on the psychological conditions and teach clinicians, particularly the front-line professionals, that there is a complexity here they must start to deal with."
